OpenKit Brings back Cross-Platform Social Leaderboards

When OpenFeint was shut down in late 2012, lots of iOS and Android game developers were left without social functionalities or connection to social networks in their software. Popular games like Fruit Ninja, Fieldrunners or Pocket God were affected. Now, co-founders of OpenFeint released OpenKit, a successor API for cross-platform social services.

OpenKit offers APIs for iOS, Android and Unity based games and supports a universal authentication mechanism for user ids of Game Center, Google+ and Facebook for seamlessly integrating those services.

The OpenKit SDK focuses on engagement and re-engagement in games with the following features:

Social Leaderboards - Tracking of scores across platforms and user networks. Besides using Game Center and Google+ leaderboards, scores can be compared using Facebook.

Social Challenges - Bringing back players in the game by push notifications that alert users when their high scores are beaten by a friend.

Smart Invites - Increasing the user base for a game by letting users invite friends, no matter what platform or user network they use.

Ghosting - Adding game data to leaderboards, so friends can play against each other asynchronously. By replaying ghost data, single player games can be turned into "virtual" multi player games.

Achievements - Letting users compare their game progress with their friends with the help of achievements. Achievements also drive users to further explore a game. Unlocked achievements can be posted to Twitter and Facebook.

OpenKit can be used as a hosted service with up to 150.000 monthly active users being free of charge. Between 150.000 and 1.000.000 monthly active users, fees range from $100 to $1000 per month. Since OpenKit is open source, the services can also be hosted by the game developers themselves - leaving them full control over their users' data.